


a dust of snow

by Araine



Category: Young Wizards - Diane Duane
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-21
Updated: 2011-12-21
Packaged: 2017-10-27 15:34:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,955
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/297368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Araine/pseuds/Araine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dairine is feeling disconsolate on Christmas.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a dust of snow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Reading Redhead (readingredhead)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/readingredhead/gifts).



Christmas Eve had been as gray and drear as any November day. The clouds overhead had loomed exasperatedly with the empty threat of snow to come, and in their tenure over the state of New York had only succeeded in making everything feel wet and cold.

Now that dark had fallen at a measly four-o-clock the day felt like it was over before it had even really begun.

Dairine Callahan was feeling disconsolate, as she had been all day.

“It should snow,” she said to the fog that covered the front windows, obscuring the almost-garish Christmas display just across Nassau Road to a blurring of lights and color. She wiped a swath of moisture from the window and looked outside.

The stars were hidden by cloud cover, and the only lights that lit the night were the colorful twinkling of Christmas fairy lights and the yellow-gold spilling across the street from house windows. It would be Hallmark-picturesque, if there were snow.

She hadn’t meant to be so bah-humbug, hadn’t come up with a plan for it, and couldn’t think of any good reason to not enjoy the holiday. But here she was, not enjoying it all the same.

“Dairine, can you check on the turkey?” her father’s somewhat-harried voice asked her from across the house.

She considered refusing and pawning the job off on her sister who, to the extent of Dairine’s knowledge, wasn’t doing anything but cuddling with her boyfriend in the next room, then carefully weighed her options. Her father might not be exactly able to ground her if he started _worrying_ about her again, but he was quite friendly with Tom and Carl, and they could tie her to the planet if they thought it necessary.

“Sure,” she called back, as reluctant as the clouds overhead, and she pushed away from the window and the sudden burst of melancholia to check on the cooking fowl that was already filling the room with its warm and pleasant aroma. Dairine was at least looking forward to the feast to come. The Rodriguez family was coming over for dinner, because Christmas dinner for three felt like a supremely lonely affair, and Dairine had gone ahead and invited Roshaun and Nelaid and Miril in a fit of pique. Marina’s cooking always promised to be a hit, as did Carmela’s conversation, and Dairine was feeling in just the right mood to pick a good fight with Roshaun.

Neither cooking nor conversation nor quickly-offended alien monarchy would arrive until six, however, leaving Dairine to her own devices.

Dairine peered in on the turkey, baking in the oven.

“I’m not actually sure what I should be looking for,” she confessed to her unobtrusive and sentient laptop, Spot. “How do you know when a turkey’s cooked?”

Spot – whom Dairine usually thought of as male in nature, and who usually spoke in a voice vaguely reminiscent of Stephen Hawking – had adopted the voice of Siri, the latest in a long line of inventions by a very popular computing firm that Spot was currently disguised as.

 _Once it reaches a minimum of 74 degrees through its entirety, it should be cooked,”_ the computer said. _“Although it’s recommended that it reach at least 82 degrees, for thorough cooking._

“Right,” Dairine said. “So you’re telling me I can’t just eyeball it. How hot do you think it is--?”

 _53.227 degrees precisely._

“So it’s got a ways to go.”

 _The timer should be sufficient._

“Right,” Dairine said, and then she called to her dad. “Dad, the turkey looks fine to me!”

She waited long enough for his muffled thank you, and then returned to the living room. In the absence of something pressing do to, the gloom once again began to creep up on her.

 _Perhaps that is why you are so disconsolate this season,_ Spot observed.

Dairine thought about it. Everything was normal this Christmas. She’d managed to get everything sorted with school this past semester, and her biggest wizardly project—finding Roshaun and dragging him back from the brink of a lost universe—was over and done with.

“I think I need to get out of the house,” Dairine said, and she already knew where she would go.

She had avoided the moon for months, since the fight against the pullulus effect and the Lone Power and Roshaun’s untimely disappearance. But she wanted for chill in the air and glaring white all across the horizon and stars in the sky, and so she found herself on the very lip of Mare Crisium.

There was no reason she shouldn’t be enjoying herself this Christmas.

She picked up a medium sized rock and threw it down the rolling slope at her feet. It bounced four or five times until Dairine lost sight of it, kicking up dust that lingered like in the air before slowly drifting downwards.

“Look,” she said to Spot. “Snow.”

“If the snow were made of solid basalt, perhaps. Hello Dairine.”

The intruding voice was male, not computerized, and familiar. Dairine should have been surprised to find Roshaun intruding on her solitude, but she wasn’t.

“I’m surprised to find you here, and not at your family’s domicile,” Roshaun said. “Considering the point of the holiday is—“

“Family,” Dairine said. “Right. Doesn’t mean I can’t want to be alone.” Without looking at Roshaun, she drew her legs up to her chest and stared out across the sea in front of her. “Maybe I got sick of Christmas cheer and needed a breather.”

Roshaun said nothing, and only sat down beside Dairine. She stole a look at the way the reflected light of the moon’s surface turned his cheekbones into valleys and his gold-blond hair to wisps of silver luminescence.

“I thought I told you I wanted to be alone,” Dairine said. The warmth of Roshaun’s body heat was almost tangible in the chill, and in the stillness Dairine could almost hear his heart beat in time with the thrumming pulse at his throat. She leaned in.

“So tell me to go away.”

Roshaun’s eyes were wide and green and reflecting the milky way far above.

“Don’t you have kingly things that need doing?” Dairine asked. “Balls to attend, decrees that need to be made—“

“I am allowed to take breaks,” Roshaun said. “On occasion.”

“So,” Dairine said, turning her head fully towards the alien king. “No Christmas parties that you desperately need to get to?”

Roshaun’s turned his eyes from the stars up above to extravagantly roll them Dairine’s way. Dairine snorted in a way she should have been self-conscious about. The tips of Roshaun’s lips turned upwards.

“Sorry,” she said. “It was a joke.”

“Oh?” Roshaun said. “I was beginning to think you were merely uncouth enough to forego cultural sensitivity.”

Dairine’s laugh was much restrained this time. “Does Wellakh even have holidays?”

“Yes,” Roshaun said slowly. “Which you might have learned by consulting your manual.”

“I didn’t think about it until now,” Dairine said. She rocked back on her stone perch, swinging her legs. “Besides, you have the insider’s scoop.”

Roshaun took a moment to puzzle out the idiom. “I suppose you want me to tell you about them,” he said.

“That was sort of the point of asking about it, yes,” Dairine said, and she braced herself on her hands, eyes unfailingly on Roshaun. “So, do you have anything like Christmas?”

“Only one that might be roughly analogous,” Roshaun said. He turned away from Dairine and looked up at the sky overhead. “Once an Ellipse we have Aphelion, when Wellakh’s orbit is furthest from our star. It’s some cause for celebration.”

“I—“ Dairine said.

“We,” Roshaun said, “celebrate a good many other holidays. But that is our only winter celebration tied to any aspect of our star’s astronomy.”

“I see,” Dairine said. “That’s gotta be… an interesting reminder.”

“It isn’t the worst.” Roshaun looked down and away from the sky above, and he smiled wanly at Dairine. The moonlight made the shadows on his face stretch. “There are several feasts We must attend, but the worst political tensions tend to die down, and it can actually be quite fun. Sometimes. Now then. What is the real reason you are up here?”

“I told you,” Dairine said. “I wanted to be alone.”

Roshaun said nothing, only looked at Dairine. She shifted uncomfortably under his gaze.

“I’m not really in the holiday spirit,” she said. “And I don’t really want to ruin it for everyone else when I don’t even know why. I’m just… sad, and that feels wrong on Christmas.” She made a face in Roshaun’s direction. “Guess I’ve sort of messed that up, huh.”

“Today isn’t a holiday for me,” Roshaun said, “as we’ve discussed.”

The calculated blandness of his expression almost made Dairine laugh, but she sobered quickly and looked down onto the flat white expanse of the bone-dry sea before her, thinking hard. What was it about Christmases past that she had so looked forward to?

The sudden truth of an answer came with a sudden power that shocked and astounded her that she could even have thought it a mystery. Dairine curled her legs in on herself and rested her head on her knees.

“Roshaun,” she said, “I miss my mom.”

The admission hung in the air for a stunned second, and then a warm arm clamped about her shoulders and pulled her close to a warmer chest and Dairine felt all the breath go out of her. She curled in closer to the Wellakhit’s higher body heat.

For a long time they just sat. Dairine didn’t cry, though sometimes she felt like penetrating the silence of the moon’s surface with big wailing sobs and ruining the expensive fabric of Roshaun’s overtunic with saltwater. She only sat, and thought of hot chocolate waiting on the counter for her after a snowy day spent pelting Nita with snowballs, and was grateful for the arm around her shoulder until she got restless enough to move.

“Thanks,” she said, muffled by phlegm at the back of her throat. "It's been two years, I should be--"

“I don’t think that you’re obligated to be happy this holiday,” Roshaun said. "Or any other day, for that matter."

“Do you ever feel miserable on-- what'd you call it? Aphelion?”

Dairine turned her head up to look into Roshaun's eyes. He wasn't looking far away at the stars or at the Mare below, but instead down at Dairine. His brows were pressed together like pages from a book. His teeth made furrows in his lip.

“Yes. As you mentioned, it is an... interesting reminder.”

“What do you do when that happens?”

Roshaun grinned suddenly and impishly.

“I usually fake it,” he said. “Until I'm sure nobody has any notion I was ever feeling poorly.”

“Well,” Dairine said. “I'm not sure what my counselor would say to that, but-- I can sure as hell try it.”

Roshaun studied her face with his green eyes, brow creased once more. “You know,” he said, “I suppose you don't have to fake it for everybody.”

Dairine forced a smile onto her face.

“See? Faking it already. Bring on the turkey and pies and presents. I hope my dad got me that night sky projector.”

“Back to earth then?” Roshaun said. Dairine shrugged off Roshaun’s embrace and stood up. He joined her, and a moment later his hand found hers. Dairine squeezed it for reassurance – though she never knew quite who it was for.

The magic of the transport spell finally released them into a swirl of drifting white flakes obscuring yards and fairy lights, and when Dairine smiled steam rose through her teeth and made patterns in the air before her.

“Look,” she said to Roshaun. “Snow.”


End file.
